Connie Zheng

Gold mine is a Chinese landscape painting in oil, whose subject is a scene that could exist only in an age of plastic and global circuitries of trade. Traditional Chinese landscape painting deliberately flattens perspective and de-privileges human figures relative to the landscape, and this painting attempts to explore whether or not an ancient aesthetic form could speak to our current relationship to the environment. The reference image for the painting is a composite that I created using digital photos from a news story about a man buried alive in a landfill: the painting itself is an accumulation of scenes of accumulation, filtered through multiple lenses, narratives and concerns.